Jeremy Corbyn: Old Labour, New Conspiracy Theories

Whilst fulfilling my democratic duty of knowing the news, I encountered an article by Martin Robbins in the NewStatesman detailing what Robbins refers to as Jeremy’s Corbyn’s ‘paranoid style‘. The paranoid style is a conspiratorial suspicion of the establishment that many Corbynistas promote, which Robbins excellently explains, and references several occasions when Corbyn has been hopelessly pipe-dreaming some extreme faux facts. This is not unusual in politics, except for Corbyn it has reached an epic grandeur. To Robbins, it’s a ‘bunker mentality’ where there is ‘no compromise, only [ideological] purity’. (I want to confess, I was a Corbyn sympathiser until I discovered by living there that the socialist paradise of Sweden is a myth and researched Sweden’s economic history). But what are the causes of Corbyn’s paranoid style? One likely factor is simple hubris.

This hubris is one reason why Corbyn will accept ‘no compromise, only purity’. As leader of a new social movement Corbyn has become the figurehead of a puritan caste. To concede a political compromise would be to conspire with agents of inequality, but furthermore doubt the movement’s venerable principles. So better the Labour Party be reduced to shambolic ruin under Corbyn’s paranoid-style than participate in the system he will never change.